The Elsenburg Agricultural College lies 50 km east of Cape Town, tucked among the quiet valleys of the Cape Winelands. This is one of South Africa’s most fertile regions, and for the past three centuries its surface has been dominated by thousand-acre plantations, its wealth extracted in the form of olives, fruit, and wine. Originally […]
The Edge of Wrong Music Festival in Cape Town adds value, especially in places where radio airtime has until very recently been monopolized by the American pop genre.
When your Uber driver has never heard of Muhammad Ali you realize you're not his friend and you and he occupy different worlds.
For the last three months, we have been working on the sound design of my first feature-length documentary, Taking Stock, a film about my father and our third-generation family business in Benoni, a city to the east of Johannesburg. I brought a crew of close friends I had met at film school in the USA […]
Is the new benchmark in South African cinema “Happiness Is A Four Letter Word"?
As with our last movie night post, we need to start with the bad news. 1. The Durban International Film Festival (or DIFF), one of the most important film festivals on the African continent, has been through some turmoil lately. With only a couple months to go to DIFF, the festival manager Sarah Dawson as […]
The color red, berets, and plain workers’ clothing have all become potent aesthetic symbols for South Africa's EFF.
The political theorist Achille Mbembe, from the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, describes South Africa as experiencing a “negative moment.” Though protest and dissatisfaction with the terms of the “new” South Africa have been brewing for some time, there is a strong sense that the black majority is losing patience with the ruling African […]
The latest installment of our film news series, #MovieNight.
The struggle against the marginalization of students and the exploitation of workers at a historically black university in South Africa.
South Africa’s economic realities (inequality, poverty, unemployment, demographic underrepresentation, racism) must be at the heart of the curriculum.
At a time when South Africa is on fire politically, there is sadly zero social commentary on rapper Proverb's album, "The Read Tape."
The vigorous disruption by social movements and artists of the thuggish racialized mythmaking that dominates Stellenbosch’s cultural memory.
There are so many lessons from (and horrors) from the violence against black students at South Africa’s University of the Free State (for background, see here) but here are my own observations: (1) While movements like #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall have been powerful and poetic, the willingness by white Afrikaner youth at theUniversity of the Free State (UFS) to resort […]
To equate the rage of South African student protestors with the official brutality of the state is the bedrock of conservatism.
The task for the new generation of South African activists is to reimagine power. That means resisting the impulse to use power in a way that demeans and cheapens and exploits.
The unprecedented levels of security for the opening of South Africa's Parliament in Cape Town.
To every passing person, he calls out variations of one question: "What film are you watching? Are you watching my film?
It's the end of the year, so Hipsters Dont Dance made a "Top World Carnival Collabs" of 2015.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, adored by the youth of Soweto in the 1980s, has gained traction in the activist imagination once more.